NEW DELHI: Opensignal, in its latest report, examined the mobile network experience of the four main operators in India including Airtel, BSNL, Jio and Vi, over a period of 90 days beginning on May 1, 2020.

In its first operator-level analysis of how our Indian users experience mobile games while playing over cellular networks, Airtel has come out on top, with a score of 55.6 out of 100. 

This measure of the mobile experience analyzes how the multiplayer mobile Games Experience is affected by mobile network conditions including latency, packet loss and jitter to determine the impact on gameplay. The higher the score, the less likely it is that our users felt that their experience was marred by cellular connectivity issues.

Airtel has also won the Video Experience award for the fourth time in a row and this time round it was the only operator to place in the Good (55-65) category for this measure of the mobile experience. Its lead over the second-placed operator — Vi in this report and Vodafone in our previous one — rose from 2.4 points to 3.4 points despite the challenges faced by all operators in 2020.

Meanwhile, Jio kept hold of both the 4G Availability award and the 4G Coverage Experience award — it has won the former ever since we first started reporting on the Indian mobile network experience back in April 2017 and has now won the 4G Coverage Experience award for two reports in a row. That said, Airtel has continued to chip away at its dominance on both measures of the mobile experience.

Airtel has also won the award for Download Speed Experience, this time with a score of 10.4 Mbps. However, newly created Vi is hard on its heels – our users on the merged Vodafone/Idea network observed average download speeds that were only 0.3 Mbps below those seen by their counterparts on Airtel – down from the lead of 0.6 Mbps that Airtel commanded over Vodafone in our last report.

Vi, created from the merger of Vodafone and Idea, has won the Upload Speed Experience award with a score of 3.5 Mbps — beating second-placed Airtel by 0.7 Mbps (24.7%). The average upload speeds observed by our Vi users were 1.3 Mbps faster than those seen by their Jio counterparts. In our previous report, Vodafone (one of the two operators – the other being Idea – that combined to create Vi), won the Upload Speed Experience award and it cleanly passed on the award to its successor despite the distractions created by the merger and the COVID-19 pandemic.

In its regional analysis of 49 cities, it saw Airtel come close to challenging Jio’s dominance on 4G Availability in a majority of the cities although Jio continued to win almost all awards. However, as a result of the close results Jio did not make a clean sweep in 4G Availability: while Jio won in 48 cities outright it drew for the first place with Airtel in Coimbatore.

Our users on Airtel’s network, on average, were able to connect to 4G services more than 95% of the time in 42 cities, while their Jio counterparts in Rajkot continue to enjoy the highest 4G Availability of 99.3% in a city, the report said.